Call of Duty Cold War is even bigger than Modern Warfare in 4K 'Ultra RTX' mode

Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War
(Image credit: Treyarch)

If you can believe it, Call of Duty Cold War will be even more gargantuan than the last CoD, Treyarch has confirmed. The PC specifications for Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War were released yesterday, and while the general specification looks a little easier on your PC than the beta insisted upon, it's the 250GB of storage space you'll need to free up for 'Ultra RTX' mode that has our HDD cages rattling in fear.

Okay, settle down. That's only for the RTX on, 4K-out-your-ears mode, which also asks for an Nvidia RTX 3080. This includes everything necessary to "run the game at a high FPS in 4K resolution with ray tracing". In other words, massive high-res textures and the like.

(Image credit: Treyarch)

If you aren't aiming for 4K, and instead see yourself instead looking for the maximum refresh rate your monitor can muster, all game modes combined will require just 175GB. If all you really want is the bare, no-frills multiplayer experience, you'll need just 50GB free on your SSD or HDD.

That's only at launch, however. Treyarch recommends you free up that much space for the game in its initial launch state. Who knows how much of your PC it'll eventually swallow up.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, with Warzone installed, takes up a grand total of 231GB on my PC. That includes all the updates and new stuff added in over the game's year long shelf-life, including: game modes, patches, watches, guns, map changes, etc. You get it.

Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War is sure to be one and the same—an ever-evolving game with ever-increasing storage requirements. Are you ready? If you don't think you can muster enough willpower to wipe your precious digital belongings, perhaps you should take a look at our best SSD for gaming guide. High-speed, high-capacity storage has never been cheaper.

You can dive into Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War from November 13.

Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.